When I visited Jakarta for the Yahoo Open Hack Day 2009 late last month, apart from presenting the talk on YQL, I was also in the judging panel. One of the things that very quickly struck me was the point from which all the bloggers started. This is an important thing to observe.
Starting on social networks or using their power is so 2008 at this point of time. The first thing in vogue is to use the power of GPS and build solid location aware utility services. The second things in vogue is that of using twitter and other streams of micro blogging.
Thirdly, even in countries like Indonesia (and much like India and China) where the mobile penetration is not not very high and is mostly lower end Internet connectivity for whatever penetration there is, the focus on building mobile aware apps is huge. This ties in, of course, with the first item which is to build GPS and location aware products, but you could build powerful apps that just depend on you being mobile, if nothing else.
Over the next few months, the battle for attention in the tech space is now for apps built on these paradigms - mobile, location-aware and stream-aware. What is encouraging, clearly, is that its not the hackers in the silicon valley who are thinking along these lines, but hackers in Jakarta, Indonesia which is the epitome of a developing country who are jumping on the new age paradigms.
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